10 ms·

How does it treat the international drug dealing cartels (root cause of the disease)?

• nebabyte 9y ago
  As a crime capitalizing on perpetuating a disease? How else do you think they would.
• kobeya 9y ago
  Drug use is decriminalized. Drug distribution is not.
• enjo 9y ago
  The root cause of the disease is that people like drugs. The cartels are a symptom of the larger problem, not the other way around.
  • rodolphoarruda 9y ago
    If you eliminate the cartels, would people continue to use/like drugs? Would they look for other forms of addiction?
    • dfischer 9y ago
      Yes
    • hfourm 9y ago
      Further, even if you did "eliminate" the cartels, more would pop up. If there is a demand, someone will find a way to make money off of it.
    • dalore 9y ago
      If you eliminate one two more pop up in its place. The demand it there. If you cut off supply it will go somewhere else. If you treat it as a disease then you look at why the demand. Reduce the demand (or give a legal supply) and drug cartels can't operate.
    • eat_veggies 9y ago
      People like drugs because they like getting high, not because they like cartels or doing illegal business or being rebellious.
      • ythn 9y ago
        People like drugs because they allow an escape from their normal lives, which they don't like. Boredom, depression, etc. Read about the rat park experiment, rats like being high too if their lives suck.
        • DonaldFisk 9y ago
          The principal author of the Rat Park paper, Bruce Alexander, has a web site on addiction: http://www.brucekalexander.com http://www.brucekalexander.com
        • astronautjones 9y ago
          People like drugs for the same reason that consumer culture has become an uncontrollable beast - you can use the dollars you earned to bring you joy. Some people prefer it to alter their state of consciousness. Society should step in to stop people who are doing it recklessly, just as they should when people are hoarders, people are obese - it's all the same thing, somebody has only found one Skinner button that works for them in a world of Skinner buttons you're meant to press
    • adventured 9y ago
      The US has spent hundreds of billions of dollars domestically and in Latin America over four decades trying to eliminate or restrain dozens of major cartels. It can't be done. It's obvious why it can't be done. In that span of time, there has been no other nation on the planet with greater technological, military, financial resources to throw at something like prosecuting the so called war on drugs. If the US couldn't kill the cartels & illegal supply with that approach, it can't be done that way. The fact that it would fail was always an obvious logical conclusion ahead of time (we even had prohibition to reference as a blatant demonstration), but we have the benefit of vast actual results of perpetual failure and destruction to throw on top of just reasoning it through. Fortunately the majority of Americans have come around to understanding the war on drugs has completely failed and for that reason the WoD is over (specifically it's on its last legs).
    • andrepd 9y ago
      >If you eliminate the cartels Can't be done. It's useless to waste a single further breath entertaining that idea.
    • DrScump 9y ago
      Cartels or not, you can't have success by attacking primarily the supply side of this trade.
    • ridgeguy 9y ago
      Of course they would. Would an individual considering whether to buy/use a drug actually evaluate the involvement of a cartel in their decision? I doubt it. I suspect demand for drugs is largely independent of their legal status. Legalization would not open the floodgates to reservoirs of potential users previously held back by law.
    • jacquesm 9y ago
      New ones would appear more or less overnight. The economic incentive is simply too large and there are always people who already are criminals who see an angle and will move into the space. Cartels are a result, not a root cause so removing them will have zero effect.
    • Clubber 9y ago
      Yes, desire for altered conscious is human nature. It's why kids spin around to get dizzy. http://www.therooster.com/blog/kids-love-getting-dizzy-and-lightheaded-proving-drive-get-fucked-natural http://www.therooster.com/blog/kids-love-getting-dizzy-and-l...
• adekok 9y ago
  "root cause"? As in no one would use drugs if the cartels didn't exist? How about removing the revenue from the drug dealing cartels? How much power would they have then?
• notadoc 9y ago
  Your thinking is basically that supply is the problem rather than the demand? Keep in mind "international drug dealing cartels" would not exist if there were no demand for their product.
• dep_b 9y ago
  The root cause of the heroin epidemic are the legal drugs cartels in the US. Wherever they have been banned from giving addicting painkillers to people (like Portugal) heroin abuse has been going down pretty heavily instead. But we wouldn't jail our precious Wall Street people, would we? 60.000 people dead per year is just...a little statistic...most of them Trump voters or black people anyway! No problem killing thousands of brown people in the war on drugs though. They shouldn't try to corrupt the American population with patent-free opioids!
• dragonwriter 9y ago
  Cartels don't cause addiction. Addiction + prohibition causes cartels.
  • dredmorbius 9y ago
    Quite honestly, there's almost certainly some bidirectional feedback going on.
• andrepd 9y ago
  Drug trafficking isn't a root cause, it's a symptom of prohibitionism of substances in high demand.
  • dredmorbius 9y ago
    Are there no crimes for goods or services for which there are legal sources?
• rodolphoarruda 9y ago
  I decided to start with a couple of polemic questions to get a sense of how people would react to somebody a bit more inclined to the other side of the scale. I believe addiction is a disease and the sick must be treated with high priority. My younger brother started taking drugs even before high-school, like most boys here where I live. He had no choice. He wanted to play bass with that band and hang out with them. Pot and cocaine, basically. Tobacco and booze came later when he was in college. He made it to the end and got a major in Advertising with a minor in Psychology. Two years after graduation he was struggling to find a decent job and that led him to a whole decade of drug abuse. He has developed some sort of schizophrenia and has a problem in his lungs. Today he lives with my mother, as he cannot live alone, and he makes a living selling SIM chips in a kiosk inside a supermarket. On top of all that, he has depression, so needs to control it taking medications. My brother is just another drop in the ocean of addicts. I feel sorry for him. I feel sorry for my mother. Our family started treating him as a sick person only 10 years ago, and it was too late for him. So I strongly believe all addicts should be treated at the earliest possible while there is still a chance of recovery. I have spent the last 40 years of my life watching how drug cartels operate down here in the third world. I hate them, of course. Their entire structure, from the 8 year-old who takes drugs to school and share them with his buddies to the drug lords who dine with politicians every night. I'm part of the group of people who believe addiction starts at early age, adolescence, when people really enjoy taking drugs, loads of them. Distribution starts really at school, and for free. They normally choose two brothers, one must be older and outside school, the other, in school. They take the older and kindly offer him a gun/ammo or good money. In exchange, his little brother is now part of the cartel and will have to distribute drugs at school. This little man will be arrested countless times, but released in the same day once his mother pops up into the police station. He will be back to his "job" next morning. In case his mother decides to take him out for treatment, the consequence is that the elder brother now has a serious problem with the local drug distributors and will have to choose between working for them, saying goodbye to normal life he used to have, or death. In the long run, both brothers will be neck deep into crime. The reason "war on drugs" doesn't work anywhere is because it is not a real war. Governments are mostly investigating, arresting, taking to jury etc. There is no extreme, war like violence, between government and drug cartels. No mass killing. Elimination, as I wrote in another thread. So the government thinks it has "destroyed" a cartel, when in fact it has just "dismantled" it until people at lower layers see vacant positions they can be filling in. Yes, government let WoD as it is, is a multi decade, multi trillion dollar worldwide worthless effort. Take that money and help the sick. On the other hand, WoD in the slums is a completely different ball game. It is extremely effective because it is violent to infinity. Cartels operate in total monopoly within their territories. No sharing. If you look at the news coming from Rio de Janeiro this week, there is a war going on between a handful of groups interested in a specific region. Those "Fallujah battle" like scenes we see on TV is the tip of the iceberg. It is what can be shown to society. Down there in the ground, when a slum is finally taken over, that when the barbaric mode turns on. The unlucky bastards and their relatives who didn't die in shootings will be subject to beheadings, all limbs amputated, burned/buried alive etc. War. Everyone from the losing cartel is killed and a new monopoly starts. "Ok, so what if you decriminalize production/distribution to weaken the cartels, giving the population the choice to stay away from all that horror and still buy better quality drugs at a fraction of their cost on the streets and use them without the possibility of being arrested?" Now, you, third-world government and law enforcement broke the monopoly. And now you are going to face the real war on drugs (no quotes). It's going to be everywhere. The immediate reaction will be something like what happened back in 2006 in Sao Paulo[1]. "Since early Friday May 12, 2006 there have been 299 attacks against public establishments such as police stations, justice forums, buses, etc.; which are allegedly organized by the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) criminal organization." Yep, 299 attacks in 5 days. Just because some cops killed some key assets from the criminal organization. That is insignificant next to the possible impact of ending the monopoly of their main revenue stream: drugs production and distribution. They would kill/barbarize people all along government's drug "supply chain". At the factory, at the warehouse... retail shop? I can't even imagine the violence. And, finally, consumers. Bad consumers who made the bad decision to support the monopoly break. Those would be killed at the shop's door so the media could do its job and promote it nationwide. I also believe cartels would have no trouble in massively robbing premium grade drugs from the government and sell them afterwards. For that, they can use the same .50 cal and TNT used elsewhere to rob banks and armored cars[2]. "They" in this case is not a handful of dudes, but 50. "The robbers numbered about 50 and came armed with high-caliber weapons, grenades, dynamite..." So, IMHO, drugs decriminalization may weaken some cartel ops in developed countries, improving quality of life in many ways. No doubt. But that's not necessarily the case in third-world nations where organized crime is big, rich and unthinkably violent. I wish my government could be as violent as the cartels are and kill everyone. Elimination. Yes. That's the monopoly gameplay. It would trigger something like the 2006 event[1], but then the Army and all law enforcement would fight back nationwide, at all levels. The vacant slots in the cartel structure wouldn't see any backfill. Of course, no government can do that to its own people these days in modern society. Well, maybe there are some examples here and there, but that doesn't matter, my wish is pure utopia, a crazy fantasy. It won't happen. So let's treat the sick the best way we can. Portugal, parabéns! Thank you for reading this to the end. It was a long day for me and English, as you obviously know, is not my first language. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_S%C3%A3o_Paulo_violence_outbreak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_S%C3%A3o_Paulo_violence_o... [2] http://www.latimes.com/world/mexico-americas/la-fg-paraguay-robbery-20170425-story.html http://www.latimes.com/world/mexico-americas/la-fg-paraguay-...